Saturday, October 21, 2017

Submission to the Lancet commission on Syria

Some reflections on the
relation between civilisation and violence, peace and war, bio-politics and
necro-politics

Introduction: ‘I can’t believe I am protesting this shit again’

Throughout the world today we increasingly see
a reversal of what was in early modernity too often optimistically considered an
irreversible linear civilizational process. In the past there was a firm
belief, at least in the west, that we humans were progressing from a society
based on arbitrariness, law-lessness, intolerance, unrestrained exploitation of
humans and natural resources, and more or less generalized authoritarianism and
violence to a more peaceful society increasingly regulated by the rule of law, democracy,
tolerance towards otherness, measured exploitation of people and an
exploitation of natural resources aware of the limited availability of these
resources and the need to protect nature and create ecologically sustainable
futures. Today we see those earlier forms of relationality re-invading social
space with authoritarianism, sexism, racism and the unbridled exploitation of people
and resources on the rise. ‘I can’t believe I am protesting this shit again’
said a banner carried by a woman opposed to US president Trump’s proposed
introduction of laws restricting women’s access to abortion clinics. So firm is
the idea that we ought to be progressing towards an increasingly peaceful,
tolerant, lawful society that these intrusions of micro and macro forms of
authoritarianism, domination and violence into social space are seen as
unusual. They are also defined popularly and by some analysts as ‘a crisis’
such as when the ‘rise of racist violence’ is defined as a crisis.

The idea that the appearances of these micro
or macro forms of oppression, exploitation and violence represent in themselves
a crisis is based on particular conceptions of the relation between ‘peaceful
civilized reality’ and ‘violent uncivilized reality’. It is those conceptions
that need to be challenged if we are to better understand the relation between
violent and non-violent forms of existence in the world today. So let us begin
by examining what these conceptions entail.

Civilisation as negation or repression of
violence

To begin with,
and as the chosen terminology ‘peaceful civilized reality’ and ‘violent
uncivilized reality’ already indicates, in these dominant conceptions we have
an association of violence with barbarism and non-violence with civilization.
Now as far as the relation between these two orders is concerned, this is seen
in two ways: The first as a relation of negation and the second as a relation
of repression. Negation involves the idea that wherever civilization comes democracy,
the rule of law and reason displace and replace the violent and barbaric rule
of authoritarianism, arbitrariness. The latter simply disappear as the former
consolidate themselves into a new civilized order. Repression on the other hand
involves the different idea that the new civilized non-violent order is a
continuous process of taming violence, cruelty and savagery. The capacity and
the tendency towards violence is always there and the function of civilization
is to stop this capacity and tendency from materializing. What distinguishes
negation from repression is that in the first conception civilization is seen
as eradicating violence entirely wherever it manages to institutionalise itself,
while in the second civilization is in a continuous struggle with the violent
order of life that is always there in a latent form and is always ready to rear
its head wherever and whenever civilization falters or weakens.

It could be said
that negation as a conception belongs to an early optimistic phase of modernity
where the belief in the capacity of civilized non-violent life to spread and
entrench itself was strong and where for some people at least there was a
palpable experience of a retreat in the forms of life ruled by authoritarianism
and where violence prevailed. Today, repression is a far more popular
conception as it can make sense of an experience of decline in the colonizing
momentum of the democracy-tolerance-rule of law assemblage and can help explain
the re-emergence of the micro and macro violent forms of life mentioned above.
But also the belief that there is a struggle between the forces of civilization
and the forces of despotism and violence with each representing a different set
of antagonistic interests. Thus while the optimism of the idea of ‘negation’
has disappeared, the idea of ‘repression’ maintains it in a more qualified way.
It stages a situation where, on one hand, it allows for a pessimistic outlook
which can make sense of a reality where racist, nationalist, ethnic,
homophobic, sexist and other forms of violence is on the rise, continuously
rearing their head, but on the other hand, it offers the optimistic promise
that there are forces, from education to policing, that are fighting against
this uncivilized order and which, if supported, can still prevail and perform
their repressive function and allow the civilized order of life to prevail.

But there is an
even greater optimism underlying this conception of the repressive relation
between civilization and uncivilized orders of life: it is the idea that they
belong to two different and antagonistic political and moral orders. It is a
version of a struggle between good and evil where the two can easily be
distinguished from each other and where ‘any reasonable normal person’ would
know where they stand and which side to support in this struggle. In this mode
of thinking, the inability of the civilized order to tame violence, such as the
situation we find ourselves in today, constitutes a ‘crisis’ (defined as an
intrusion of evil into the space of goodness) which will continue for as long
as violence and its source are not properly domesticated.

This same
relation between civilization and barbarism, and between good and evil, is also
the lense through which some see, with a slightly simplified Foucauldian gaze,
the relation between an imagined civilized democratic good government and an
imagined barbaric violent bad government: the first is a government that is
primarily interested in the politics of fostering of life; a government that rules
through an interest in controlling the forces and mechanisms that shape the
physiological and psychological health of its population. It is a government
that maintains itself in power through these bio-political practices. The
second is a government that has no interest in the lives of those it rules but
rather in the way it maintains power over them repressively. Such a government
rules though the control of demonstrative and actual violence and the
technologies of death and domination. It is a government that maintains itself through
its necro-political practices. Similar to the way the relation between
civilized and violent modes of existence, as examined above, is conceived,
bio-politics is seen as flourishing either through the displacement and
negation of the primacy of the necro-political or through the repression of the
necro-political. And in much the same way, necro-political spaces when they
intrude are seen in themselves as constituting a crisis, as blotch on the
bio-political landscape, a failure of the bio-political to saturate political
space with its civilized logic.

Violence as foundational to the civilizing process

While there are clearly some important
differences between the conception of the relation between civilization and
violence as one of negation and as one of repression, they nonetheless both
work by creating a radical difference between the two. In both, as we have
seen, civilizational forces and violent forces, bio-political forces and
necro-political forces are antagonistic to each other and are seen as having
nothing in common. There is, however, a third way of conceiving the relation
between civilized spaces and spaces of violence which highlights forms of dependency
between the two, a relation that the conceptions examined above disallow us to
perceive and understand. In this third conception, civilized peaceful space,
even though it might be aiming to repress the spaces of violence, it is also,
paradoxically, dependent on it for its very existence.

A good introduction into this relation is what
Marx has called ‘Primitive Accumulation’. In his critique of political economy,
Marx ridicules the story classical economic theory tells itself about the
origin of wealth and whereby wealth begins when, unlike the majority of people
who unthinkingly live for the present and spend what they have, a group of
people decide to think for the future. They start living a frugal and thrifty
life and in doing so manage to save the money that becomes the original capital
accumulation. Marx argues that there is no historical evidence of this kind of
accumulation ever occurring. In fact, he argues, most early forms of
accumulation of capital occur in the form of violent appropriation of wealth
like theft, piracy and plunder. In this sense, civilised capitalism has its
origins in what Marx then called ‘primitive accumulation’. What’s more as the
argument was later developed by radical political economists, capitalism is
continuously in need of such a ‘primitive accumulation’ which historically most
often took the form of violent colonial appropriation of wealth, or the
creation of spaces of extreme exploitation of people and resources.

Here, then, we have a very different
conception of the relation between ‘civilised space’ and the space of violence.
Civilised space is not antagonistic to violence but has violence as its very
historical and structural foundation. This is not specific to capitalist
primitive accumulation. Though primitive accumulation draws our attention to
the more generalized phenomenon where civilization is founded on violence. We
can sit in a very civilized and cosmopolitan restaurant and eat a particularly
pleasant and well-presented piece of steak, but behind this experience and at
its very foundation lies the killing of an animal. This is no different from
enjoying a nice cosmopolitan cup of coffee in Tel Aviv and forgetting the
violence towards Palestinians which has made this experience possible.
Likewise, we could enjoy the peace and the health facilities that the Assad
regime provided some of its population and forget the people languishing in its
prisons, or the populations that have been massacred with chemical weapons, and
which made ‘peace and health facilities’ in some other places possible to
experience. Just as civilization is grounded in violence, so is bio-politics
grounded in necro-politics: some are made to die in order for others to be made
to live.

Perhaps one of the most important
ramifications of thinking the relation between civilized bio-political and
violent necro-political modes of existence in this way is a radically different
conception of what constitutes a crisis. In the first section we looked at how
crisis is perceived as the very existence of violence in what should be a
peaceful civilized space. This can only be true if we believe that civilization
and violence are opposites and that civilization aims at eradicating violence.
But if we take as our starting point that civilizational bio-political
existence needs violent spaces as a condition of its emergence we arrive at a
different conception of crisis. This is because, first of all, we arrive at a
different conception of civilization. Instead of saying that civilization is
the process of eradicating or repressing violence, we say that civilization is
the art of hiding or concealing from people the violence needed for them to
experience a peaceful civilized existence. Colonialism by locating the space of
violent necro-political appropriation in a space geographically remote from the
metropolis used geographical separation as a mode of concealment. The citizens
of London did not have to experience the necro-political dimension of governing
India that was at the foundation of their civilized existence. But the
technologies of concealment are different when necro-political space is within
the nation such as in a colonial settler society like Australia or Israel, or
in an authoritarian regime such that of Baathist Syria. Indeed it can be said
that what makes some nations more civilized than other is their capacity to
hide their foundational necro-political violence from their citizens. Even more
so, we can also say that the wealthier a nation is, the more sophisticated are
the mechanisms of concealment at its disposal. It is from this perspective that
we arrive at a different conception of crisis: crisis is not the emergence of
violence amid peaceful civilized space since this violence is always there and civilized
space needs it. Rather, crisis is the failure of the mechanisms of concealment.
It is when the foundational violence that was concealed seeps into the peaceful
interior where it is not supposed to appear that makes the people occupying
those violent free spaces experience a ‘crisis’.

Conclusions

From the above we can offer a couple of
tentative theses relating to Syria:

1.The difference between the state of war and the state of peace in Syria
is not a difference between a state where a civilized bio-political imperative
ruled and where a necro-political order has replaced it.

2.One of the key differences between bio-political and necro-political
space is that the repressive government of bio-political spaces involves the
primacy of policing while the repressive domination of necro-political spaces
involves the primacy of war. The nature of the crisis that existed in Syria
prior to the current war was that already at that time policing against certain
sections of the population took the form of a war of eradication. Therefore
what we have today is an extension rather than an emergence of the space of war
and necro-politics.

3.The provision of health and the entire bio-political network of pre-war
Syria was founded on an extensive necro-political order which constituted the
foundation of its bio-political order. That is, the Syrian regime was already
predisposed to treat a large part of its population as enemies that need to be
eradicated rather than as citizens whose quality of life needed to be
maximised. When one speaks of a return to the norm in Syria this is the norm.

4.Non-Syrian organisations aiming to intervene in Syrian space have had
to face a particular situation: It is not that the State was no longer able to
provide health for a section of the population. Nor is it simply that the State
had no interest in the provision of health for this same section of the
population.It is that the State had an
interest in the extermination of such a population as part of its strategy to
lay the foundation of its post-war bio-political order. Health organisations
are not operating where governmental bio-politics has failed. They are
operating where governmental necro-politics is being practiced successfully.